You are a dental hygiene instructor in your local community college dental hygiene program teaching the community oral health course. The dean of the health sciences division would like to implement a trial run of an interprofessional education (IPE) initiative involving dental hygiene and the other healthcare professions education programs in the college. You are asked to coordinate the development and administration of dental hygiene's involvement through your community course and other community experiences in clinical and other courses. The intent is to place a group of dental hygiene students in the incoming class in the IPE program and use questionnaires, interviews, and examinations to collect and analyze process and outcomes data over their 2 years in the program to determine outcomes. Outcomes data will include students' learning of the required community oral health content in addition to their understanding, perceptions, attitudes, and future interest in relation to interprofessional collaborative practice (ICP). The data will be analyzed to evaluate the value and success of the program and to determine if it should be continued and expanded or discontinued after the initial 2 years.
-All of the following EXCEPT one are necessary to control errors and bias in the evaluation of this trial-run program. Which one is the EXCEPTION?
A) Validate the reflection questions used to collect formative data throughout the course by having it reviewed by educational experts
B) Have a set of standard questions to ask in an exit interview with each student at end of the course
C) Have the same team of faculty conduct all interviews and calibrate the team members in preparation for conducting the interviews
D) Videotape the exit interviews conducted with the students at the end of the course

Question

Quizplus · Accepted Answer

Procedures are necessary to control errors and ensure unbiased collection of data. Using standardized or validated measurement instruments is important to control bias and errors. Asking the same questions of all students in the IPE group during their exit interviews will also standardize the data collection process. Calibration will ensure intrarater reliability, which is consistency within each person who conducts interviews. Calibrating multiple examiners to one another will ensure interrater reliability, which is consistency among two or more people who are collecting data. Using only one interviewer can also prevent interrater variability. Other factors can also affect the validity of responses during data collection (interviews and questionnaires)-for example, time of day, setting of data collection, and personalities and biases of interviewers. These factors should be controlled and consistent for all students; when uncontrolled, these are referred to as extraneous variables and are sources of error. Other possible sources of error in this program evaluation are the use of a sample that is either too small or unrepresentative. With a small population, it is best to collect data from the entire population. For example, with only 10 students in the IPE group, data should be collected from all of them rather than from a sample of them. Control of extraneous variables is also important-for example, controlling the characteristics of the IPE students in comparison to the characteristics of the non-IPE students (age, sex, ethnic group, and incoming GPA).

You Are a Dental Hygiene Instructor in Your Local Community